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Welcome! This is a place to post my musings about Christianity, Science, Theology, Philosophy and how it all fits together. I hope to answer questions that people pose to me about the Christian faith, as well as post the answers that I find to questions about my faith that I encounter.
Please check out this page under the same name on facebook where I share what I write, little blurbs, as well as videos and writings from others whose work I enjoy

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What I
want to do today is to write a brief summary of each of the arguments for the
existence of God that I have come across in my studies; that seem to hold any
water (I won’t be calling on the youtube video that argues for design just
because a human hand can hold a banana). If I miss any that you believe to be a
part of this review, please contact me and I will research the argument and
update my post here.
The
Kalam Cosmological Argument https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CulBuMCLg0
– This argument focuses on the prime mover, or the uncaused first cause. The
argument goes as such: everything that begins to exist has a cause, the
universe began to exist; therefore the universe has a cause. Dr. William Lane
Craig is the biggest proponent of this argument, and further develops the
characteristics of this prime mover and shows that the God of Christianity is
the best fit for this uncaused first cause.
The
Contingency Argument https://w…

What I
want to do today is to come back to an older article that I wrote when I was
first starting out as an apologist. I was recently discussing various topics with a
friend of mine and we got to discussing a rather well written article about
Carl Sagan and his quest to encourage science education and the philosophy that
science will answer all of the questions that humanity has about the world.
What you will find here is that original article that I have augmented with
some of my thoughts after spending a few years maturing as an apologist.
Before I get started, I guess the
definition of miracle could be stated, since the word can be used for many
different situations. From the Merriam-Webster website, the three definitions
of miracle are as follows: 1) an extraordinary event manifesting divine intervention
in human affairs, 2) an extremely outstanding or unusual event, thing, or
accomplishment, and 3) a divinely natural phenomenon experience humanly as the
fulfill…

Plenty
of people will try to prop themselves up on their own intellect by stating they
are smarter than our predecessors. I see this idea pop up in multiple ideas,
such as the ancient aliens hypothesis, or the ever-so-famous God of the gaps. I
also wonder if people find that our nature, and our base desires ever really
change. To the latter, I doubt that humans have changed at their core. To the
former, I think that humanity has indeed increased their knowledge of the
world, and some cultures did deify natural events, but I don’t think any
culture is wiser than the other, and that Christianity does not provide a basis
for the God of the gaps hypothesis. What I hope to do today is to untangle this
series of questions and show that belief in God, specifically Christianity,
does not come from a lack of knowledge or intelligence, but rather a lack of
ability to save humanity from its own sinful nature. We all have a natural
desire for life, and a natural intuition to know…

Quite a
few people have been convinced by the mass media that more science and
education are the answer to everything, but is it really? Science is quite good
at what it does, but it does have limitations and areas that its hands cannot
reach.
Now as
I have stated before, I am a scientist, or at least a graduate student of
chemistry, whichever title you would like to apply. I have no delusions about
the limitations of science and where it cannot possibly reach. There are those
who will have their own definitions of science, and honestly it is rather
overused in the United States at least. Science is a field where hypotheses can
be repeatedly tested to be proven or disproven. There are plenty of fields where
science cannot carry out this rigorous testing and retesting, so I would not
classify these fields as sciences. Take history for example, unless we figure
out how to go back in time and verify events for ourselves, we are left with
only the account…

Welcome
to my suspiciously titled post. It seems that no matter what we do, what
stance we take politically, or what have you, the gremlins of social media will
never be happy with us because they will always have some questions for us. Why
don’t we support such and such cause, why don’t we denounce such and such
group? These people will always want us to be taking their side or give them
what they want to hear. They want to mold us into their selfish image for
multiple reasons, be it needing to be always right, needing an echo chamber,
not standing the idea of an opposing viewpoint, etc. Some of you may be
expecting me to say that God is the same way and is the reason he pursues us
and sends those awful door to door ministers to talk to you about Him, but you
would be misguided. It is true that God pursues us, but he does not do it out
of a selfish megalomania. God pursues us out of His infinite love and desire
for fellowship with His creation. God tells us that we s…

In
Colossians 2:8, we are told to not fall for the traps of the philosophy of men.
There are those that take this verse, other pieces of scripture, and their own
misguided view of faith to try and mean that we should not study philosophy,
even as a means of apologetics. I believe that this is an extreme view, just as
much as the extreme view of spending all of our time studying about God, but
never really pursuing a relationship with God. While I am all for the study of
apologetics, Dr. Ravi Zacharias puts it best, that apologetics are the
seasoning, and the gospel of Christ is the main course. However, I want to
unpack this a little bit more. What I want to do here is explore what it means
to me to love God with all of our minds.
We are
told to love God with all of our heart, mind, soul, and strength. Mind is
second in this list, but I think that it is very easily ignored by the majority
of the church. In this age of secularism and reason, the church …

Blaise
Pascal was a renowned scientist, and a profound Christian writer. He had many
contributions to the scientific community, including the first digital
calculator, a fundamental gas law,
and had his name set to a unit of pressure. However, his contribution to the
Christian community, in the form of what we call Pascal’s wager. Pascal’s wager says: If a person does not believe in God
and God does not exist, then that person gains nothing. On the other hand, if a
person does not believe in God and God actually does exist, that
person stands to lose everything. The consequence for wagering incorrectly
would involve an infinite loss (eternal exclusion from life with God, or hell).
In terms of a cost-benefit analysis, the one who wagers against God has nothing
to gain and everything to lose. Given these two options, Pascal logically asserts
that the prudent person should wager on God. However, should this be a
brute force method to shut down any sort of argument about …

I’ve
been mulling this one over for a while, and I think I can put it all onto paper
now. I’ve been thinking specifically, about the testimony of the church as it
relates to today’s issues. When I was younger, I had always heard the
caricature of the church and Christians as uptight prudes who never smile
because everything is sinful. While I think this one is easily dismissed if
people will get to know Christians, it is the most recent description of church
that troubles me. We are painted as hypocrites, we do not practice what we
preach, which is one of the most common objections to Christianity. I just heard
a video from the YouTube channel LutheranSatire that described the faith vs
works dilemma that we see between Catholics and Protestants. What struck me is
that we are justified before God by faith, but it is our works that show to
other people that we are transformed Christians or not. If we are no different
from the people that we are trying to convert, if the…

I’ve
heard the argument, and I’ve indeed posted quotes about this, that people are
Christians because they view it as a crutch philosophy. In a way, Christianity
is a crutch, but not in the way critics and accusers, and even Christians with
the wrong idea, think. We can do nothing apart from Christ (John 15:5), so our
relationship with him is more of a wooden leg, rather than a crutch that we use
only when we need help walking. We are called to lean on God, and not our own
understanding. Christianity is here to answer some of the greatest
philosophical questions of mankind, but as we are warned in Colossians 2:8 “See
to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy,
which depends on human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces of this
world rather than on Christ”. This would mean that we are not to be taken in by
the appeal of ideas, but rather the person of Jesus. It is through the
relationship with God through Jesus that we are saved…

When we
look at different religions, and the various evidences for them, I would argue
that Christianity has the most robust case in terms of historical and
philosophical evidence. Given this, there are plenty of people who look at the
evidence for the person of Christ and the claims of the Bible, and some are not
convinced, and some wholeheartedly believe and give their lives to Jesus. We
can look at the stories of many prominent Christians and Atheists, from
multiple fields of study, and see that it is not a case of training or
intellect, as the New Atheists try to push on religious people. We can see
multiple examples of prominent scientists, philosophers, politicians, and just
everyday people that we know on either side of the aisle. We as humans are
generally pretty intelligent when we want to be, and we all have our own
opinions about God and eternity. So what gives? Why, when confronted with the
overwhelming evidence that confirms the historicity of the claims …

I think
I have covered this type of question in passing, but people seem to think that
apologetics and evangelism are miles apart when it comes to their disciplines
and how they relate to Christian ministry. In fact, I think they are two sides
of the same coin. I believe that in today’s culture, with the demand for
sources for everything that we assert, that apologetics needs to be woven
seamlessly into evangelism and vice versa.
First,
I would like to set my views on evangelism and apologetics. From what I seem to
understand, evangelism is the spread of the gospel through our own personal
testimonies and speaking from scripture. Apologetics comes from the greek word
apologia, a legal term meaning “to give a defense”. This means that Christian
apologists use evidence to give a defense for our faith, in obedience to 1
Peter 3:15.
My
problems with evangelism and apologetics are these. In my experience,
apologists can fall into the trap …

I have
recently, and have before, found myself falling into despair. Not because of my
life being bad, it has never been better, but because of my own realization
that this is temporary, and I have no idea what comes next. I am afraid of a question, what if there is nothing after? As a Christian, I know the answer that to
be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord, and that we will be
given new physical bodies in the New Jerusalem. Yet I worry still about the
future. God has given us many commands to not be afraid, but here I am as a
human. When this fear and panic hits me, I hit my knees and pray to God for
peace. I read the Bible and hear his words and his promises.
I
realize in scripture that I am not the only one to have this agony. We can see
this in the books of Job and Ecclesiastes. Solomon despaired of his life, and
had found it all meaningless in that book. He concluded that even if it is all
meaningless, we should rejoice in our …

Jesus
even said that the crop is ready, but the workers are few (Matthew 9:37). In my
church that my wife and I attend has a sign as you leave the sanctuary “You are
now entering your mission field.” We all are called to go and make disciples, so
are you working on that mission? I try to work in the large and potentially
hostile field of the internet, and maybe you do too. I also try and work in the
real world where I can physically show the love that God has for his people. I
admit that I don’t always do this, but I am convicted to try and do more. We as
a church have gotten lax, at least in the United States, but I think this
current social and political climate have gotten people stirring from their
metaphorical chairs. We need to keep the love of Christ in mind though and be
prepared to add to the discussions with love and respect (1 Peter 3:15). We may
also see the church fall from it’s social majority position for the first time
since the founding of the United …

I
recently got into a rather heated discussion posted by a priest who wrote an
article for TIME magazine that was saying that we need to accept the LGBT+
community in the church. I disagree with it based on the implied idea that the
word accept brings to the table, that the church would be signaling that
homosexuality and those forms of sexual immorality are ok. While the article itself
was only talking about reaching out and welcoming the LGBT+ community into the
church instead of excluding them like some churches are accused of, I doubt
people were reading it fully and just running with the headline, much like I
did in the first part of this paragraph. The question I want to pose is, how
should the church reach out to the LGBT community? What I want to do here is to
look at some scripture in the old and New Testament to show that homosexuality is
indeed a moral sin, and not just a ceremonial law that was fulfilled when
Christ came and that Christians are picking and…

Don’t worry, this isn’t a topically
late post about 13 reasons why. My mother and I were actually talking about a
list she found on Linked in titled “13 Things Mentally Strong People don’t
do. It’s talking about mental habits
that we should not do in a professional sense. We got to thinking how to apply
this list to Christians, because we suffer from mental health problems like
everyone else. What I would like to is to go through this list and apply
scriptural principles to it and change the list to 13 Things Mentally Strong
Christians Don’t Do. 1)They don’t
stay in their comfort zone- Go and make disciples of men (Matthew
28:16-20). Jesus called his disciples from fishing boats, medicine, and tax
offices to follow him and to spread the gospel. If we consider Paul, he was
called from the religious Jewish elite to support a new faith that many were
trying to kill, literally and figuratively. I can see this parallel with the
Christians who are converts from Islam. 2)They don’t
give in t…

Now
that I have your attention with the Star Trek quote. Let’s seriously think
about things. In the United States, everyone was talking about how Hilary won
the popular vote and how she should have won because that was the democratic
way. By the way, the United States is not a democracy but a constitutional
republic so that the little guy is protected from being ruled by the big
cities, but that is starting to get off topic from where I want to be tonight.
I don’t want to go terribly political here, but instead that I want to talk
about how God can value us all as a people, but still be able to care about us
all as individuals. Allow me to bring a few examples from scripture to mind to
show that God is indeed capable of this duality.
We can
look three parables that Jesus taught during his ministry to show that God does
care about the individual and will do everything in his power to seek and save
the one. First, we can look at the parable of the lost …

I’ve been
seeing a lot of talk of censorship and talks of hate speech, offensive speech,
and what should or should not be said. It’s got me thinking, as one who
believes that political power needs to be with the individual, not centralized
to some monstrous bureaucracy that some want to create and that we are seeing
starting to come to fruition here in the US and in other countries across the
globe. As an American, I worry for the First Amendment, which guarantees our
right to free speech and free criticism of our government without fear or
persecution by our peers or imprisonment by some tyrant. As a Christian, I
worry for our freedom of religion and the free practice thereof, with a certain
former presidential candidate saying that “Christians would have to change
their beliefs”. As an apologist, I worry for the pursuit of truth and the
dissemination of that truth. So let’s start at the root of this and take a look
at scripture and answer a couple of questions, “Doe…

Recently,
the United States and multiple nations around the globe had marches in the name
of Science after comments from President Trump that he was going to dissolve
the EPA and has threatened federal science funding. Now, as a scientist who
hopes to continue in a research position at a state school some day, this is a
little concerning. I don’t think it is quite the nightmare scenario that people
make it out to be, but I do agree that
if we stop research to move America forward then we will stagnate and
continue to slip as a global leader. As a Christian my first allegiance is to
the kingdom of God and its people, but we all serve on this Earth and we have
commands to take care of it (Genesis 2:15, Proverbs 12:10, Revelation 11:18,
Genesis 1:26, Proverbs 27:18, Numbers 35:33, Psalm 24:1). We have a command to
take care of the Earth as it’s tenants, as I am expected to take care of the
apartment that my wife and I rent right now. I have written before about how we
a…